The Guess Who was slightly before my time. I started listening to radio just in time for Bachman-Turner Overdrive. This is "Let It Ride".
The lyrics are strange: The chorus says the singer is the one who did wrong, but in the verses the singer is accusing someone else of doing wrong. And so I Googled to find out about the song.
From Songfacts.com: "Randy Bachman and Fred Turner of Bachman-Turner Overdrive got the idea for this song when they were driving to a gig in New Orleans.
As Bachman tells it, they were driving on a highway when a few truckers decided to have some fun with the musicians, who were riding in the little van from Canada. The truckers boxed them in and slowed down to a crawl. When they finally turned into a truck stop, Randy and Fred followed them with the intent of giving them a good talking to. Unfortunately, in the words of Randy Bachman, "The trucker looked like a Volkswagen with a head." The truckers had a good laugh and told the band that they needed to learn to "Let it ride."
Bachman and Turner had never heard that expression before, but they liked the sound of it: it meant to just relax and not let things upset you. When they got to New Orleans, they wrote the song in their dressing room."
The site also says that Randy Bachman based the guitar riff on Dvorak's "Piano Concerto in D". Who knew?
